New mac user is toast needed reccomended or necessary

Question

I am new to mac.
I understand that Toast is one of the better programs for burning CD's and DVD's on the mac.
Is it necessary? Can I easily burn DVD's and moveis without toast?
I hvae the elgato eyetv. Is the only way to burn movies from DVD to VHS with toast?
If not toast is there a better alternative?

Answer 1

I understand that Toast is one of the better programs
for burning CD's and DVD's on the mac.
Toast can burn CD and DVD formats not available with OSX utilities, such as mixed audio/data CDs, but is not required for most disk uses.
Is it necessary? Can I easily burn DVD's and moveis
without toast?
For your own movies you would use iMovie and iDVD. If you have a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive, use DVD Imager
<http://lonestar.utsa.edu/llee/applescript/dvdimager.html>
to create a disk image file, then burn that to a DVD with Disk Utility.
I have the elgato eyetv. Is the only way to burn
movies from DVD to VHS with toast?
If not toast is there a better alternative?
You can export the EyeTV movie in a format that iDVD can use, but iDVD will take a long time to re-encode it to MPEG-2 for the DVD, and there will be some loss of quality if EyeTV already had the movie in MPEG-2 format. If it is in MPEG-2 format it is a lot faster to use Toast or Sizzle (free)
<http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17331>